Vending Ban Widens: Not Just Food but Also Books and Art

By MIKE ALLEN

Published: June 2, 1998

Broadening their efforts to limit what they see as dangerous congestion on New York City's sidewalks, Giuliani administration officials said yesterday that their vending ban would include not only food carts but also street sales of books, baseball cards, art, T-shirts and all other goods.

The ambitious enforcement plan targets yet another signature of the Manhattan streetscape and potentially courts a First Amendment battle, according to opponents of the restrictions. The widening of the ban also gives food vendors a host of potential new allies as they seek to build opposition to the rules by staging a citywide shutdown of the carts tomorrow.

The new restrictions, to be enforced by the police beginning in about mid-July, cover 144 blocks of Manhattan, including much of the financial district and several stretches of midtown. In the past, the city has designated some areas where food vending was prohibited and others where it banned vending of general merchandise like clothing. Peddlers of books and other printed matter were accorded the widest latitude because of their First Amendment rights.

But Earl Andrews Jr., chairman of the city's Sidewalk Vendor Review Panel, which approved the 144-block ban, said the restrictions approved by the panel applied to vendors of both food and general merchandise, and thus covered artists and those who sell printed matter.

''If a street is congested, it's going to be congested, whether it's a food vendor or a general vendor,'' said Mr. Andrews, who is Commissioner of the Department of Business Services. ''All vending should exist in an area where there is no congestion and no threat to the safety of the citizens and the flow of traffic.''

Street artists, who have been persistent critics of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, said they would join the food vendors in a demonstration that is to begin at 9 A.M. tomorrow in City Hall Park, to be followed with a lunchtime march to Wall Street and back.

Robert Lederman, president of Artists' Response to Illegal State Tactics, said the wider ban would mean that ''fundamental elements of free speech and alternative expression'' would be ''the next casualty in the Mayor's quality of life campaign.''

''This is not just about hot dogs,'' Mr. Lederman said. ''Mayor Giuliani's war on vendors is virtually eliminating free expression from large areas of New York City's public streets.''

Gabriel Taussig, the chief of the administrative law division of the city's Law Department, said peddlers of books and other printed matter, including collectors' cards, were exempt from city regulations requiring vendors to be licensed. But he said the city was allowed to place limits on their displays -- for instance, how much space they take up on a sidewalk and their proximity to a subway entrance. Under the same rationale, he said, the city could limit the streets on which the vendors could set up.

In the case of street artists, Mr. Taussig said that under a 1996 decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, the artists have the same rights as book vendors. ''The legal principle is that we have to give the greatest deference to vendors engaged in First Amendment activity,'' Mr. Taussig said. The standard has been that book vendors were disallowed in places where both food and general-merchandise vendors were prohibited.

The administration officials were elaborating on comments that Mr. Giuliani had made at a news conference earlier in the day, when he had seemed to doubt whether the city could impose the same restrictions on book merchants that it would impose on food carts. Asked whether the regulations would also apply to book vendors, the Mayor said: ''The rules apply to food vendors. The rules with regard to book vendors are different because of their additional First Amendment protection.''

City Councilman Anthony D. Weiner, a Brooklyn Democrat who has called for the abolition of the Sidewalk Vendor Review Panel, said that the broad enforcement was ''intellectually consistent'' on the part of the administration but that it put Mr. Giuliani in a potential ''legal thicket.'' Mr. Wiener charged that the review panel's decisions were arbitrary and were targeted in many cases at neighborhoods where ''sophisticated lobbying'' resulted in vendor bans.

''The result is a process built more on politics than on public safety,'' Mr. Weiner said. ''Although courts may allow that when it comes to buying a hot dog, they can be expected to have a higher standard when it comes to the First Amendment.''

Mr. Andrews, the chairman of the Sidewalk Vendor Review Panel, said the official list of vending restrictions would be published by the city in two to three weeks. Enforcement is to begin 30 days after that. He said many areas would remain open to vending, and asserted that the availability of goods ''is not going to drastically change at all.''

''Vendors are a part of the fabric of New York,'' Mr. Andrews said. ''We are not trying to stop vending. We are only regulating it.''

On June 17, the vendor review panel will begin reviewing a second round of petitions for more bans on vending. On Friday, officials made available 40 petitions covering 95 blocks of Manhattan, filed by a broad array of New York institutions, from the Museum of Modern Art to Lenox Hill Hospital. Mr. Andrews said at least 25 more petitions had been received.

The Big Apple Food Vendors Association, which is organizing tomorrow's march, said 2,000 more corners were at risk of being restricted. The Mayor's staff discounted that figure as a wild exaggeration.